Re:Economic costs of war
by throw0101a on Tuesday August 17, 2021 @06:53AM
(#28208457)
> we've thought continually we were dealing with another defeated Japan or defeated Germany --the enemy population would just comply to our wishes, so we kept on thinking we could "turn them into replicas of American government"
They did not "comply". They came to realize it was better to emulate the US:
> This is not to say that Japan remained fascist (as some left-wing commentators assert). It most obviously and manifestly did not remain fascist. Instead, various leaders who had earlier supported and even participated in fascism decided that liberal democracy was better for the country. One reason they made this decision is that the U.S. had just proven liberal democracy’s economic and military effectiveness by winning WW2. They almost certainly could have restored dictatorship in Japan — the U.S. was clearly willing to tolerate dictatorships among its Cold War allies in Korea, Taiwan and elsewhere — but they chose not to. Instead, they drew from a liberal democratic trend that had existed in Japan well before the military takeover of the 1930s.
Both Japan and Germany had liberal democratic histories before they got taken over by fascists, so it wasn't a stretch. Cultures based on clan/kinship tend to have higher corruption and lower stability:
They did not "comply". They came to realize it was better to emulate the US:
> This is not to say that Japan remained fascist (as some left-wing commentators assert). It most obviously and manifestly did not remain fascist. Instead, various leaders who had earlier supported and even participated in fascism decided that liberal democracy was better for the country. One reason they made this decision is that the U.S. had just proven liberal democracy’s economic and military effectiveness by winning WW2. They almost certainly could have restored dictatorship in Japan — the U.S. was clearly willing to tolerate dictatorships among its Cold War allies in Korea, Taiwan and elsewhere — but they chose not to. Instead, they drew from a liberal democratic trend that had existed in Japan well before the military takeover of the 1930s.
* https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/the-afghanistan-occupation...
Both Japan and Germany had liberal democratic histories before they got taken over by fascists, so it wasn't a stretch. Cultures based on clan/kinship tend to have higher corruption and lower stability:
* https://ideas.repec.org/p/sfu/sfudps/dp17-17.html
* https://www.u4.no/publications/the-kinship-in-public-office-...
* https://www.scirp.org/journal/paperinformation.aspx?paperid=...